Cloud Bridge - Cloud Studio Add-On for HDRI Wizard
FeaturesEvery sky deserves at least one cloud worth staring at. Cloud Bridge is the cloud studio made for HDRI Wizard: a standalone workshop where you grow a single cloud as a true 3D volume, sculpt it with a full deformation toolkit, light it with its own rig of colored lights, and bake it — lit exactly as you staged it — to a crisp transparent billboard that drops straight into your HDRI Wizard sky. Not a haze pass. Not a soft procedural smear. One cloud, built by hand, with real cauliflower definition.
Definition is the whole idea. A blurred sky can only ever be weather — but a defined cloud can become something: a dragon over a desert, a fortress of storm light, a perfect lonely cumulus over a summer field. Cloud Bridge sculpts each cloud individually and bakes it sharp, so your skies stop being backgrounds and start being subjects.
It begins in the Shapes Library — more than sixty forms, from the founding Cumulus puff to towers, anvils, lenticular discs, serpents, croissants, arches, hearts, and grand-perspective banks that recede to the horizon. Beside them live the Arrays: whole patterns grown and baked as one unit — mackerel skies, cloud streets, criss-crossing chemtrails, concentric echo rings, a golden-angle sunflower spiral, staggered tadpole shoals laid out for a widescreen sky. Dial the Seed and an array re-deals itself into a fresh arrangement, reproducible forever.
Then the Contortion Factory goes to work. Puff count, size range, density, coverage, flatness, spread, turbulence — every slider re-grows the cloud live on the stage. Five noise voices (Perlin, Cellular, Curl, Ridged, FBM) blend to give the surface its character, from smooth rolling billows to wind-torn shreds, each voice with its own strength and feature size. Even the voxel grid itself is a creative dial: grow chunky and bold, or unlock the fine-grid ceiling and grow razor-edged cirrus detail that survives all the way into the bake.
And when our shapes aren't enough, draw your own. The Spline Editor is cloud authoring, right on the 3D stage: sketch a strand, click the curve to add nodes, drag them anywhere in space, and watch the puffs string themselves along your line. One Knit dial slides a strand from a solid continuous form to a string of separated cloudlets — shape and array are two ends of the same slider. Stack waves of strands, each with its own count, thickness, straggle, and personality; hide one, transform one, or pull a favorite curl in from another project. Every gesture is undoable.
Better still, every library shape can step through the door: one click on Convert to Splines rebuilds it as editable strands — a ring becomes five draggable circles, cloud streets become movable lanes, and even the free-form puffs become single-node anchors you can arrange across your sky. A converted cloud starts as a living template: spin its seed and the layout re-deals; the moment your hand touches a node, the template lets go and the cloud is yours. Dialed until touched, authored after.
Then you light it — and this is where Cloud Bridge leaves every flat cloud image behind. An encircling rig of up to six colored lights surrounds the cloud, each with its own hue, intensity, position, cone, and aim point, plus a tunable ambient. Sunset rim from the left, cool sky fill from above, a violet underlight for drama — the volume shadows itself under every lamp, and all of it bakes into the pixels. A real scene affords you one sun; Cloud Bridge bakes a whole cinema rig into a PNG that costs your render nothing. Save any lighting mood as a reusable rig and drop it onto other clouds so a whole sky shares one weather system.
When it's right, bake it. Choose a resolution from fast 1K up to 16K, and Cloud Bridge renders the lit cloud with auto-fit framing, a clean transparent border, and dithered, banding-proof gradients — then files it on the shelf HDRI Wizard reads. In HDRI Wizard's Billboards tab, one click on Inject Cloud drops it into your sky; or send it straight from Cloud Bridge and it arrives by itself. Injecting can add a new billboard or update the one you're arranging — so the loop stays liquid: refine in Cloud Bridge, re-send, and the cloud updates in place, keeping its position and sliders. An Edge Solidity control (with a one-click Auto) firms a gauzy cloud's edges so HDRI Wizard's Edge Fade tethers it seamlessly into the sky.
Everything you make is a project. A cloud saves as one small file holding its shape, its sliders, its seed, and its full light rig — kilobytes, not gigabytes — browsable as picture tiles in the Projects library. Mix and match freely: load another project's rig onto your cloud, pull another project's shape under your lighting, audition new base forms without losing a thing. Because every cloud is a deterministic recipe, any cloud can be re-grown, re-lit, and re-baked at any resolution, forever.
And the clouds are open to everyone. Cloud Bridge is pack-ready: a themed folder of cloud files is a complete, living product — recipients get re-editable, re-bakeable clouds, not flattened stills, and authored spline clouds even share their strands as reusable curves. Published Artists are encouraged to create and sell their own Cloud Bridge cloud packs in the Daz Store. Ask in the HDRI Wizard (EZ3DTV) PA forums for details on how packs are made.
(HDRIWizard required for full operation of Cloud Bridge.)
118379, EZ3DTV
https://www.daz3d.com/cloud-bridge--cloud-studio-add-on-for-hdri-wizard
